Great Compact Discs (G. C. D.s)
Featured here are both essays providing overviews of an artist's work, similar to the essays published 2020-2022, and pieces about reissues and discographies. As with the title of this page/ blog/ section, Great Compact Discs, the use of hype stickers as the visual component here is done with tongue firmly in cheek. Yes, many of these are great albums, and in some cases the specific C. D. reissues noted (or the hype stickers of which are pictured) are great as well. But these reissues also embody what is historical, after-the-fact, dead or dying. Moreoever, the record labels owned by multimedia conglomerates reissue albums time and again, ripping off customers. And, sadly, many commentators on music do not help with endless talk of forgotten "classics," sounding not terribly different from the hype stickers that proclaim any given album a masterpiece. That said, those of us who prefer music of the past, no matter how much we try to listen to new music, can have only one response to the pillaging of that past music: document reissues, providing transparency about what is available on them, and offer critiques of how the music in question has been presented and interpreted.
View additional hype stickers, obis, inserts, download cards, and other packaging accoutrements at the Museum of Hype Stickers.
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December 2023
'A Discography Split in Two: The "Definitive" New Order'
August 2023
'Sun City Girls Discographical Dossier'
June 2023
'Amid Blue Öyster Cult's Fictions, Forsaken Godless Revolutions'
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A Discography Split in Two: The "Definitive" New Order
As austere and attractive as the box sets in New Order's Definitive Edition reissues series are, once the consumer peruses their track listings, disappointment abounds. The first and second of these, covering the band's debut album, Movement, and second, Power, Corruption and Lies, respectively, exclude contemporaneous tracks only released as singles. The bonus material, instead, mostly features previously-unreleased material. And yet, among this material, that perennially-abused consumer finds live versions, in some cases alternate studio versions, of single-only tracks. So why not include the singles themselves? Would they not make these reissues "definitive"?
The box for Power, Corruption and Lies is, in my opinion, especially important. That album solidified the band's signature Eighties sound and is arguably their one album that surpasses their singles. What does its Definitive Edition include as bonus material? Besides a fair amount of video documentation of live performances, of which all the box sets have plenty of options, we get "Writing Session Recordings" of a few single-only tracks, including the band's most famous single, ‘Blue Monday’, released the same year, and of which an additional instrumental version is also included. No ‘Blue Monday’ itself.
But the most peculiar example of a discography awkwardly split between albums and singles is that the Movement bonus disc includes an alternate 7-inch edit of the 1982 single ‘Temptation’. The inclusion of this track is the messiest scramble imaginable; why would it not be included on a collection of singles? Better yet, given that it is included here, again we ask: why not include the singles in "definitive" editions of the band's albums?
With the 2023 release of the third entry in the Definitive Edition series, for the band's third album Low-Life, we get further confirmation that tracks originally released as singles are not to be included in these boxes, complicated slightly by the fact that two tracks also released as singles were included on the album in question. Only "slightly"... because the album versions of these two tracks, ‘The Perfect Kiss’ and ‘Sub-Culture’, are different from their multiple single versions, and indeed these latter versions are excluded. The Low-Life super-deluxe includes the extended version of ‘Elegia’, an album track, but otherwise again the bonus second C. D. includes previously-unreleased material from the album sessions (the extended ‘Elegia’ had originally been included on a bonus fifth disc that came with a limited edition of the Retro box set and was subsequently included on the 2008 Low-Life deluxe edition).
This third "Definitive" box also complicates the situation more than "slightly".... A bifurcated discography may have made sense for New Order's early years, when one could argue that the singles are not on "definitive" editions of the albums because they are distinct from the albums, that is: early in the band's career, the singles were not included on the original versions of the albums. From 1985 onward, though, when the singles were at times included on albums, such an approach clearly does not fit. Besides, as already noted, material related to the single-only tracks have been included in the boxes; that is, no such clear bifurcation was intended. Whatever intentions were possessed by those putting these collections together might have been jumbled or abandoned in the process.
This situation: New Order's discography being sloppily handled, is not new, and it is especially frustrating because no other band coming from a Rock/ Indie backdrop thoroughly immersed themselves in the byways of dance music as much as they did. In terms of their discography, that means one over-riding thing: lots of versions of the same song, with 7-inch edits, 12-inch extended versions, and other edits and remixes all competing for space on compilations and reissues; a few songs were even re-recorded.
The apparent solution to this unfortunate situation is that a reissue of the 1987 compilation Substance was on its way, released later in 2023. After all, that release, in its various versions, arguably remains the best place to hear New Order's single-only songs, thus making it for many listeners the most important of the band's albums. An expanded seemed like a promising prospective and a sensible decision.
However, the new four-C. D. Substance reissue is not a "definitive edition," instead a simpler reissue of the original set with some bonus tracks and a live disc tacked on. Moreover, in many respects Substance has been complemented by later compilations, notably the Singles compilation, released in 2005 and re-released in 2016 with a revised track listing, and the aforementioned Retro box set, released in 2002. These two, combined with other scattered compilations, or the original singles themselves, have given consumers plenty of (overlapping, poorly organized) options to choose from.
Substance's selling point all these years is that it features the longer, superior 12-inch edits of 12 of the band's singles (plus, on the C. D. and cassette versions, their B-sides) including ‘True Faith’, newly released at the time and perhaps the other candidate besides ‘Blue Monday’ for the most popular and "classic" (meaning long-lasting, "standing the test of time") of the band's songs. Except... of course... sometimes it doesn't. It sported spiffy re-recorded versions of ‘Temptation’ and ‘Confusion’, the follow-up to ‘Blue Monday’; and the 12-inch versions of ‘Sub-Culture’, ‘Shellshock’, and (on the C. D. version) ‘The Perfect Kiss’ are abridged; that is, more discographical... "confusion"... of course.
A simple listing of the band's singles and other major non-album tracks, released from 1981 through 1987, helps clarify matters:
‘Ceremony’
in two versions, released March and September, respectively, 1981; the first version features only Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris taking a tentative step away from Joy Division; the second features Gillian Gilbert as well
‘Procession’/ ‘Everything's Gone Green’
a double A-side, released September 1981; the first song demoted to "B side" status by only being included on the second disc/ cassette of Substance, then elevated back to its previous status by being included on Singles
‘Temptation’, May 1982
‘Blue Monday’, March 1983
‘Confusion’, August 1983
‘Thieves like Us’, April 1984
‘The Perfect Kiss’, May 1985
also released on Low-Life
‘Sub-Culture’, October 1985
also released on Low-Life
‘Shellshock’, March 1986
also released on the various-artists Pretty in Pink: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
‘State of the Nation’, September 1986
also released on C. D. versions of Brotherhood
‘Bizarre Love Triangle’, November 1986
also released on Brotherhood
‘True Faith’, July 1987
‘Touched by the Hand of God’, December 1987
also released on the various-artists Salvation! Original Soundtrack
Retro, the box set that ideally would have complemented the Joy Division box set Heart and Soul (which included nearly all of that band's studio work), instead has long since been thrown into the particular dustbin reserved for annoying compilations that contain a smattering of rare and unique tracks of interest to obsessive fans but which otherwise seem absurdly pointless. It does include the 12-inch versions of ‘Temptation’ and ‘Confusion’, thus filling one major gap created by Substance, but otherwise anyone looking for a thorough collection of the band's major singles is bound to be disappointed: several of them are excluded entirely, for others the album version or an alternate mix is included.
New Order, Singles
Released 2005, revised 2016
Only a few years later, the double C. D. Singles, with its plain-jane title, held out the promise of restitution for the disappointment of Retro. It definitely was an improvement, but, considering that it exists in two different track listings, you can make safe bet that it also causes headaches for collectors and fans. Singles is supposed to feature the 7-inch versions of many of the above singles, to complement Substance with its 12-inch versions. This clear dividing line, though, quickly gets crossed on the 2005 version. On the first disc, the 7-inch versions of ‘Blue Monday’, ‘The Perfect Kiss’, ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’, and ‘True Faith’ are not included; rather, the 12-inch versions of ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘True Faith’ and the album versions of the other two. The second disc includes the 7-inch version of ‘Blue Monday 1988’, the first instance of many when the band not only re-recorded songs as they had done for Substance but also dated the new versions like so, as if they could come out with a new model every year. This choice is unfortunate but not surprising, as it was released commercially, unlike the 7-inch edit of the original ‘Blue Monday’, largely heard as a video clip. Also, ‘Confusion’ is represented by an edit of its "Rough Mix" version.
The 2016 reissue thankfully rectified most of these bizarre choices, including the 7-inch edit of ‘True Faith’, a 7-inch edit of ‘The Perfect Kiss’ originally released in foreign markets, a 7-inch edit of ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ originally released in Australia, and the promo-only 7-inch version of ‘Confusion’. The 12-inch ‘Blue Monday’ remains. Why were these 7-inch versions not on the 2005 release? Anyway, the 2016 version is better, but still not "best" (in the world of New Order compilations and reissues, there is no "best"). If only the 7-inch ‘Blue Monday’ had been included, the first disc easily could have been an excellent single source for the 7-inch versions of the 14 singles listed above.
In the end, we are left constructing a hypothetical New Order singles compilation. All this nit-picking fussiness may seem absurd, but the goal here is to make a cohesive listening experience, a selection of some of the band's best songs that would be as captivating—and addicting—as a great studio album, while also collecting all the myriad versions of certain songs that New Order made or commissioned. For now, to clarify discographical matters, first we would have albums of the original 7-inch versions and of the original 12-inch versions, then a disc of slightly-revised mixes of these basic versions and the more prominent of the many remixes. Other discs could then collect more remixes, rare edits, and other oddities. From this, listeners could then make their own playlists. Would this not be the ideal situation for listening online? Pay an annual fee, as one does at the Neil Young Archives for example, for access to an artist's complete discography (or at least studio recordings), and arrange the tracks yourself. Have record labels, or in rarer cases the artist themselves ever done a good job of organizing compilations? No. It is in fact an impossible task, best left to the individual listener.
The 7-inch-versions album would feature the original version of ‘Ceremony’, as it came out on both 7-inch and 12-inch, whereas the second version only came out on 12-inch. The 12-inch-versions album would exclude ‘Procession’ as it was not released as a 12-inch single (though it was made part of the U. S. release 1981-1982, called an E. P. but actually played at 33-and-1/3 R. P. M.) and there is not an appropriate alternate version to include as a stand-in for a 12-inch edit. The track listing is as such, with the particular version's appearances on recent C. D. reissues, either the compilations discussed here (Substance, Retro, or either version of Singles), other major collections, or the 2008 two-disc "Collector's Edition" reissues of the band's studio albums, noted. Also noted are instances wherein a track is only available via some recent digital reissues of original 12-inch singles.
‘Ceremony’
2005 and 2016 versions of Singles; Movement 2008 Collector's Edition; third disc of Substance 2023 reissue
‘Procession’
cassette and C. D. versions of Substance; Retro; 2005 and 2016 versions of Singles; Movement 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Everything's Gone Green’
2005 and 2016 versions of Singles
‘Temptation’
2005 and 2016 versions of Singles; Movement 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Blue Monday’
not readily available on disc; check You Tube
‘Confusion’
2016 version of Singles
‘Thieves like Us’
2005 and 2016 versions of Singles
‘The Perfect Kiss’
2016 version of Singles
‘Sub-Culture’
2005 and 2016 versions of Singles
‘Shellshock’
2005 and 2016 versions of Singles
‘State of the Nation’
2005 and 2016 versions of Singles
‘Bizarre Love Triangle’
2016 version of Singles
‘True Faith’
2016 version of Singles
‘Touched by the Hand of God’
Retro; 2005 and 2016 versions of Singles
The 12-inch-versions album:
‘Ceremony’
Substance; Retro; Movement 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Everything's Gone Green’
Substance; Retro; Movement 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Temptation’
third disc of Substance 2023 reissue; Retro; Movement 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Blue Monday’
Substance; Retro; 2005 and 2016 versions of Singles; Power, Corruption and Lies 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Confusion’
third disc of Substance 2023 reissue; Retro; Power, Corruption and Lies 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Thieves like Us’
Substance; Power, Corruption and Lies 2008 Collector's Edition
‘The Perfect Kiss’
L. P. editions of Substance; Substance 2023 reissue; Low-Life 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Sub-Culture’
Low-Life 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Shellshock’
available as a digital reissue of the original 12-inch and on an obscure compilation—see Wikipedia page
‘State of the Nation’
Substance
‘Bizarre Love Triangle’
Substance; Brotherhood 2008 Collector's Edition
‘True Faith’
Substance
‘Touched by the Hand of God’
Brotherhood 2008 Collector's Edition
As we see with these listings, the 7-inch versions are more accessible at the moment, solely because of the second, 2016 version of the Singles compilation. The decision to use abridged versions of some of the 12-inch versions on Substance can at least be said to have enhanced the appeal of the original vinyl releases or any reissues of them.
New Order, Movement
Originally released 1981; reissued 2008 (Discogs) and 2019 (Discogs)—these stickers from the 2008 deluxes
New Order, Power, Corruption and Lies
Originally released 1983; reissued 2008 (Discogs) and 2020 (Discogs)
New Order, Low-Life
Originally released 1985; reissued 2008 (Discogs) and 2023 (Discogs)
New Order, Brotherhood
Originally released 1986; reissued 2008 (Discogs)
The choice of versions to include in a third selection of versions of the same 14 songs gets more difficult. First of all, the 1987 versions of ‘Temptation’ and ‘Confusion’, as they became the only versions for many casual listeners wearing out their copies of Substance. We could then review what other versions are included on any edition of Substance, as well as Singles and Retro; then take a look at versions included on the second discs of the 2008 deluxe editions not yet considered; then, finally, review the singles as they were originally released to note rarer versions.
There is no other version of ‘Ceremony’ to include, unless one were to resort to the Joy Division version originally released on Heart and Soul. The same goes for ‘Procession’ and ‘Everything's Gone Green’; at this point, the band had not embraced the remixing techniques of Disco and House musics that would ultimately lead to a bewildering number of versions of their later hits. ‘The Beach’, an alternate version of ‘Blue Monday’ is mostly non-vocal. There is also apparently an abridged version of the original 12-inch mix included on one of the series of various-artists compilations The Best...Album in the World...Ever!. Another potential ‘Confusion’ is the Rough Mix, so titled because it represented what the band had completed before bringing Arthur Baker into the production process.
From ‘Confusion’ onward, the number of versions of the single-only tracks increases significantly, often quite annoyingly. Substance's aforementioned slightly-abridged 12-inch versions of ‘The Perfect Kiss’, ‘Sub-Culture’, and ‘Shellshock’ need to be noted, though ideally they would have never existed, having been made apparently only to fit the tracks within the 74 minutes that C. D.s were limited-to at the time. ‘Sub-Culture’'s ‘Dub-Vulture’, has two 7-inch edits plus a 12-inch. ‘The Perfect Kiss’ has its own alternately-titled "dub" version, ‘The Kiss of Death’, in both 7-inch and 12-inch edits, as do ‘State of the Nation’ (titled ‘Shame of the Nation‘) and ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ (‘Bizarre Dub Triangle’). ‘The Perfect Kiss’ also has a second 7-inch edit which is more directly an edit of the full-length 12-inch version. And there's the longer 12-inch version of ‘True Faith’, one of several remixes done for the band by Shep Pettibone, as well as ‘True Faith (True Dub)’. (Again, we are only discussing material released through 1987, thus ignoring the ‘True Faith-94’ release and a 1998 version of ‘Temptation’) There are also instrumental versions of several songs to consider.
‘Temptation’ [1987 version]
Substance
‘The Beach’
cassette and C. D. versions of Substance; Power, Corruption and Lies 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Confusion’ [1987 version]
Substance
‘Thieves like Us’ [instrumental]
cassette and C. D. versions of Substance; Power, Corruption and Lies 2008 Collector's Edition
‘The Perfect Kiss’ [12-inch version, abridged]
cassette and C. D. versions of Substance
‘Sub-Culture’ [12-inch version, abridged]
Substance
‘Shellshock’ [12-inch version, abridged]
Substance; Low-Life 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Shame of the Nation’ [12-inch version]
Low-Life 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Bizarre Dub Triangle’ [12-inch version]
third disc of Substance 2023 reissue
‘True Faith’ [longer, Shep Pettibone 12-inch remix]
Brotherhood 2008 Collector's Edition; third disc of Substance 2023 reissue
‘Touched by the Hand of God’ [Salvation soundtrack version]
available on the C. D. version of the soundtrack
Songs only released as B sides, such as ‘Mesh’ and ‘1963’, are not noted here, though these too tended to have 7-inch and 12-inch edits as well as alternate mixes. Some rare versions of the 14 songs in question are also being ignored for now—e. g. alternate 7-inch edits that differ by only a few seconds or extremely-obscure versions about which little information is available even at deep-dive resources like New Order Online and World in Motion.
‘Blue Monday’ [12-inch version, abridged]
The Best... Album In The World...Ever!
‘Confusion (Rough Mix)’
available as a digital reissue of the original 12-inch
‘Confusion (Rough Mix)’ [abridged]
2005 Singles
‘Confusion’ [instrumental]
Power, Corruption and Lies 2008 Collector's Edition
‘Confused Beats’
available as a digital reissue of the original 12-inch
‘Confusion Dub 1987’
third disc of Substance 2023 reissue
‘The Perfect Kiss’ [second 7-inch version]
‘The Perfect Kiss’ [instrumental]
‘The Kiss of Death’ [7-inch version]
‘The Kiss of Death’ [12-inch version]
available as a digital reissue of the original 12-inch
‘Perfect Pit’
third disc of Substance 2023 reissue; also digital reissue of the original 12-inch
‘Sub-Culture’ [second 7-inch version]
part of a various-artists 45 that came with an issue of Record Mirror
‘Dub-Vulture’ [first 7-inch version]
‘Dub-Vulture’ [second 7-inch version]
‘Dub-Vulture’ [12-inch version]
Low-Life 2008 Collector's Edition; third disc of Substance 2023 reissue
‘Shellcock’
third disc of Substance 2023 reissue
‘Shame of the Nation’ [7-inch version]
‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ [second 7-inch version]
‘Bizarre Dub Triangle’ [7-inch version]
‘True Faith’ [second 7-inch version]
‘True Faith (True Dub)’
third disc of Substance 2023 reissue
‘Touched by the Hand of Dub’ [12-inch version]
‘Touched by the Hand of Dub’ [7-inch version]
available on a Japanese C. D. version of the original 12-inch
If our initial task was to craft a single or double album's worth of New Order's singles that accomplishes the dual goal of being a cohesive listen and documenting the original releases in an organized fashion, we are now obviously only meeting the second goal. These many alternate versions, some of which are barely distinguishable from each other, would need to be mixed in with B-side tracks in addition to alternate versions of album tracks. This task is especially difficult if one keeps my chronological end point of 1987, as many of these variants are of seven songs: ‘Confusion’, ‘The Perfect Kiss’, ‘Sub-Culture’, ‘Shellshock’, ‘State of the Nation’, ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’, and ‘True Faith’, whereas we began with 14 A-side songs to work with.
With numerous new versions of these 14 songs having been released in the years since 1987, New Order's unique place in the history of Rock is readily apparent. Before them, differences among multiple versions of the same song tended to be minor, or at least considered unimportant. At times, such as in the case of the many remasters of recent decades, the differences seem to many listeners to be indecipherable, or alternately subject to intense debate on the question of their relevance. Granted, when songs got longer in the album era, we saw more 7-inch edits of album tracks. We then saw, with some artists, longer 12-inch edits, created for D. J.s, from the Disco years onward. Overall, though, the tendency has been to have a final, official version of a song, to be replayed time and again on listeners' stereo systems, the radio, and wherever else recorded music is heard. New Order brought forth the possibility of a Rock band making electronic music that could be subject to endless remixing, a hypothetical wherein every time one hears the song at a club or other public setting, one does not know which version is to be played—or, rather, if yet-another new version is being played.
The second facet of the band's story that makes it seem almost mythical is of course their origin as the remnant of Joy Division, three of the four members of that band carrying on after the suicide of singer Ian Curtis. Perhaps Bernard Sumner would have never become a singer and song composer if not for Curtis's death. In this sense, his transformation in the Eighties fulfills the promise of the Punk ideal: the amateur who does not fit social and business standards, but nonetheless charts his own particular course toward something like stardom. After all, when it comes to purposeful tunelessness, Sumner's vocal on Low-Life's ‘Love Vigilantes’ rivals any early-Smiths Morrissey. And maybe we shouldn't mention awful rhymes like: “Pretending not to see his gun/ I said let's go out and have some fun”—so very Punk? That said, ‘True Faith’ is, for me, the culmination of Sumner's, and the band's, transformation, final proof of its value. However fleeting the impressions made by its vague words, the song puts me in a mental space where I confront debilitating nostalgia and regret. Putting such thoughts into musical form, the song arrests them, crystallizes them—for a moment. That such an untrained singer, with his hearty, emotive vocal leaps foward from the mealy-mouthed performance heard on ‘Ceremony’, could compose such a crucial song, a song that, since I first heard it via its silly video clip airing on M. T. V., I would not want to live without... that is the pop dream made part of the waking world.
–Justin J. Kaw, December 2023
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Sun City Girls Discographical Dossier
What more can be said at this point about Sun City Girls, more than 15 years since the death of drummer Charles Gocher in 2007 brought the band to an end? What more can I say? Given that I did long (very long!) "Correspondence" interviews with the other two-thirds of the band, the brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, in 2006 and 2011, respectively. The answer: probably a lot more about specific recordings, since there are so many of them (and presumably archival releases are still to come, not to mention albums by Alvarious B—Alan's solo moniker—and Sir Richard Bishop and other projects the two are involved in). The more obscure the better, I suppose, but that approach is not mine. When we want to listen to a great deal of music, across wide swaths of genre, origin, and taste, we may end up eschewing the obscure, no matter what treasures other enthusiasts insist await us, and opt instead for samplings, in this case the band's best albums, in addition to notes about larger facets of their body of work.
Torch of the Mystics, Torch of the Mystics, Torch of the Mystics... we may want to recite it more because countless casual listeners out there in Rock/ Indie land have likely listened to it 10 or 20 times as often as they have anything else put out by Sun City Girls. To be fair, while the earlier Grotto of Miracles already showed the band capable of making a great album (though one that in retrospect seems timid), Torch of the Mystics is "something else all together," the one "where everything came together," their peak, a masterpiece... some phrasing like that which makes the writer feel that he is is an A. I. idiot. But seriously, it is Rock Top Ten territory: Revolver, Low, Daydream Nation, whatever your drug of choice. Alan Bishop as a vocalist "comes into his own"—there goes that A. I. again!—his performances on ‘Space Prophet Dogon’ and ‘The Flower’ are marvels, his voice at this point in his life a force of nature. Let's just stop at this point lest more clichés surface. Meanwhile, from the opening track, ‘Blue Mamba’, onward, Richard Bishop established himself as arguably the finest guitarist working in Rock music at the time, both exploring distortion-as-timbre, "alternate" tunings, and electroacoustic effects as much as the Indie stars of the time (Sonic Youth, Fushitsusha, the Dead C) and having traditional "chops," not to mention an appreciation of varied folk and foreign techniques unmatched by his peers.
Sun City Girls, Torch of the Mystics
Originally released 1990; reissued 1993 (the booklet above is from this edition) and 2015
Speaking of which.... Several years after first hearing this album, walking into a Montréal subway station, I heard a street musician playing ‘The Shining Path’, sung by Alan on this album. At first, I strained to believe that this random person was a Sun City Girls fan. Of course (while he may have been) most likely he was playing the song because it is not a Sun City Girls original, but one of many instances of them covering, or nearly-completely rearranging, others' songs (disemboweling may better describe Alan's versions of songs like Bob Dylan's ‘Wanted Man’ on the 2017 Alvarius B triple album, With a Beaker on the Burner and an Otter in the Oven). At times, these covers are of folk songs, both traditional or otherwise; ‘The Shining Path’ is a cover of ‘Llorando se Fue’ by the Bolivian group Los Kjarkas.
The Bishop brothers, partially of Lebanese of descent, were introduced to Arabic music and instruments by their father's family during their Michigan childhood. In turn, in league with Gocher, they became deeply interested in Hinduism and Southeast Asian music, including Javanese and Balinese gamelan traditions. The result in the form of Sun City Girls music, when combined with a healthy dose of Southwestern flavors from their later childhood and early-Sun City Girls years in Phoenix (Surf Rock, Latin Rock, and, as already noted, traditional musics from South America) plus Gocher's Jazz-inspired drumming, is a heady mix of styles and compositional methods.
At times, their interpretations of "foreign" musics make sourpusses out of the prudish pseudo-liberal pseudo-intelligentsia whose sensitivities regarding the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities can too often contort into gauche essentializing and reification of our genealogical backgrounds, more K. K. K. than A. C. L. U. To be fair, there are times when Sun City Girls versions of "foreign" work may come off as mere imitations. The thing is, though... their imitations may be the only reason why listeners know about the originals. Only a decade or so after enjoying the band's 2002 album Flute and Mask, especially its extended vocal excursions, often quite theatrical, did I hear examples of Balinese music that actually seemed similar, especially the vocals, namely the album Music of Bali: Barong & Keris Dance, released by Interra Recordings, documenting performances in the village of Batubulan.
The first of three Sun City Girls Singles compilations released after the band's demise, You're Never Alone with a Cigarette, collects the tracks initially considered for a possible double-L. P. configuration of Torch of the Mystics. While a tracking order for this longer version of their classic album was set at the time, Alan has said to me that this sequencing could have changed by the time the proposed double L. P. would have been released. As is, the compilation stands up well enough as a cohesive album, enough to double the size of Torch, if not double the quality. Excluding the brief ‘Harmful Little Armful (For Will Shatter)’, which borders on being a content-less joke track, my 19-track version of a double Torch is as follows:
side A
Blue Mamba
Tarmac 23
Souvenirs from Jangare
Burial in the Sky
Sev Acher
Esoterica of Abyssynia
side B
Space Prophet Dogon
The Shining Path
Amazon One
The Flower
Radar 1941
side C
Plaster Cupids Falling from the Ceiling
The Beauty of Benghazi
Wild World of Animals
100 Pounds of Black Olives
side D
Papa Legba
The Vinegar Stroke
Cafe Batik
The Fine-Tuned Machines of Lemuria
Carnival Folklore Resurrection 7: Libyan Dream, commonly justly recommended as a easy way-in to the difficult Sun City Girls discography, a second selection after Torch, is just-eclectic-enough not to be dismissed as too cohesive to be a brilliant Sun City Girls album. In other words, a great Sun City Girls album is necessarily a little messy, jarring to the listener at times, not letting him get too comfortable. The album starts with a cover of the Amboy Dukes' ‘Journey to the Center of the Mind’, not only better than the original but arguably the epitome of the late-Eighties/ early-Nineties "low-fi" aesthetic. The album then forces the listener through some standard-Girls choppy territory, before heading into gentler terrain, notably a string of non-vocal tracks, from ‘The Vinegar Stroke’ to ‘Sangkala Suite’, that may be as close we can get to having something to offer those who demand boilerplate Sun City Girls, plus the sing-along favorite ‘Opium Den’, the closest the band came to anything that could be considered a hit—if they had deigned to do things like release singles from albums.
Supposedly Libyan Dream was released in 1993 as a cassette, but was "unlabeled and anonymously placed in street tape stands in markets throughout Southeast Asia," as stated at the band's official web site. If it really was completed that year, it can be seen as a culmination of early Sun City Girls music, not only because the band moved to Seattle around that time but also because they soon embarked on albums less Rock-oriented, including soundtrack recordings like Juggernaut. The band's first release on its own label, Abduction Records, Kaliflower, also came out in 1993. Like Libyan Dream, it is accessible by the band's standards, but in my own estimation not as essential as what would soon come.
We should note too, before we get ahead of ourselves, that the switch to Compact Discs released by Abduction brought an end to the band's diverse series, Cloaven Cassettes, released in the years, 1987-1990, and which form another world onto themselves, both a crucial part of the "Cassette Underground" of the Eighties-early Nineties and supplemental documentation of Sun City Girls taking their baby steps, with recordings stretching back to 1982, and performing live. Abduction's founding also indirectly marked the end of series of 7-inch 45 releases, mostly released 1990-1992, some of which (as documented on the aforementioned Sun City Girls Singles reissues) were as excellent as the band's best albums.
With the double-C. D. (later, triple L. P. as well) 330,003 Crossdressers from beyond the Rig Veda, Sun City Girls matched Torch of the Mystics not only in the consistent quality of the music included, but in that the selection of tracks effectively traverses between expected instrumental Rock and experiments in "ethnic" music more likely to feature vocals. Its first-fifth tracks, from ‘Civet's Tango’ to ‘Cruel and Thin’, comprise a brilliant run of songs, with wide disparities in mood, instrumentation, and cultural traditions being drawn upon; as on Torch, these "foreign" excursions offer Alan Bishop's singing at its wondrous, at times bewildering, best. Much of the rest of the album is as good, but looser as it proceeds from brief dips into gamelan music, to a few straight-ahead songs, but mostly to longer, experimental pieces; it may leave the listener unmoored, but pleasantly so. After all, it includes a thirty-four-minute live piece, ‘Ghost Ghat Tresspass/ Sussmeier’, with guest violinist Eyvind Kang that rightly takes it place in the exclusive canon of long-form Rock-based improvisation alongside the likes of Can's ‘Halleluwah’ or numerous versions of Frank Zappa's ‘Black Napkins’ (the half-hour take found in the box-set 40th-anniversary version of Zappa in New York comes to mind, as it also features a star turn from a violinst, Eddie Jobson).
The double-C. D. companion to Crossdressers, Dante's Disneyland Inferno, also released in 1996, sees the band, who usually recorded music in a variety of settings (embracing not only the moment of recording, but whatever particular devices were available) instead working closely with producer Scott Colburn, overdubbing and unafraid to strive for well-rehearsed, meticulously-crafted productions. Indeed, Dante's, apparently not including any live recordings and dominated by vocals and the acoustic guitar, is "cleaner," in terms of sonic fidelity, than any other Girls release. When it comes to its lyrics, though, the album is quite "dirty"—moreover, it is the definitive record, the shining exemplar, of the literary side of Sun City Girls' work. While plenty of Girls fans dislike Dante's, for me it was not only a sister release to Crossdressers, but compares favorably with the latter, so that they can be collectively considered the band's two-pronged masterpiece. Admittedly, Dante's, being just as long as Crossdressers, can also be exhausting.
The bigger reason why it is disliked or ignored is that plenty of Girls fans are quite squeamish about the band's explorations of the profane. As the linguist John McWhorter describes, our understanding of what is offensive in Western civilization has switched over roughly a half-millennium from religious concerns ("damn," "hell") to the scatological and sexual ("fuck," "shit") to the identity-based ("cunt," "nigger"). If this holds, then Sun City Girls can be said to blithely bypass temporal restraints, ensuring that time travelers from the past and future will stand back with mouths agape. Most prominently, we run into Alan's persona/ alter ego Uncle Jim, a recurring feature of Girls albums. Uncle Jim's sociopolitical rants, paired with songs like ‘Soft Fragile Eggshell Minds’, provide the clearest view of the band's overall philosophy. The references to Hindu gods and goddesses; time-jumping, time-oblivious cultural imperialism of the powerful and weak alike; cynical contrarianism morphing into free-for-all, unbridled creativity... these all point to the competition for limited resources that drives humanity to the unspeakable hatred and violence that are our only constant, the only thing we're good at—and good for. These themes continue to be explored in Alan's Alvarius B releases, as well as his band the Invisible Hands, based appropriately enough in Cairo, which in recent years has witnessed humans at their best-worst as much as any other. To be blunt, without listening to Dante's closely and repeatedly, you will miss this larger view of what Sun City Girls offer us. ‘Different Kind of Whore’, from Grotto of Miracles, sums up this perspective another way: “I don't get fucked by Spartan girls/ I get fucked by the world; I don't get fucked by male master spies/ I get fucked right between the eyes.”
On the other hand, Dante's offers moments of sublime beauty, most of all the track, ‘Charles Grocher Sr.’, a loving, if rather oblique, tribute to the drummer's father. It too offers another way of explaining the album's importance to the Sun City Girls worldview. The recited text that, in the track, is accompanied by a bed of clattering percussion, a plaintive organ drone, and a few electronic effects, focuses on reincarnation, summing up: "If you don't believe in the reincarnation of the soul, how do you know that we're not all dead already?" Death, here, can be our physical death, but also intellectual and artistic deaths taking place during our lives, caused by lack of creativity, failures of nerve. The notion of reincarnation, regardless of one's spiritual beliefs or lack thereof, suggests the radical potential of empathy. You can step outside yourself, even become your enemy: the narrator does so in ‘Soft Fragile Eggshell Minds’, taking on the perspective of a murderous, power-hungry villain, and thus understands his evil. And on that note... yes, collect field recordings from across the globe, create collages of them, and release them without proper documentation, as Alan and others would do with their Sublime Frequencies record label. Yes, engage in prank performances as the band famously did in 1994 at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, sitting on stage telling stories in fake-yokel style; or, as documented in audiovideo, in 2004 at Seattle's Experience Music Project, turning a "high profile" gig into a free-form cacophonous freak show, Alan mockingly sporting an Osama Bin Laden t-shirt. Yes, make inauthentic, inappropriate music. The knowledge gained from such ventures proves necessary. You cannot survive without it.
The back covers of both of these 1996 double C. D.s noted that listeners could send a self-addressed stamped enveloped and receive in turn the lyric sheets for the albums. Alan still sent these out well into the new century, so when I finally gotten around to doing so, more than five years after the albums had come out, the following sheets arrived in the mail. Having the lyrics for at least some of the songs on these albums helps immensely in appreciating them.
Sun City Girls, when improvising with the standard Rock instrumentation of electric guitar, electric bass guitar, and a drum kit, are a source of numerous pleasures. Marc Masters, author of a broad overview of the band at Pitchfork, concurs, though I must discount his recommendation of Wah, which as a whole is an impressive performance but limited in its timbral palette and hampered by annoying distortion (this album, along Flute and Mask, was originally made available at the merch tables of the band's 2002 tour, a triumphant return to the road after not touring the States since '92). Oddly enough, writers on the band, including myself, have not noted how similar Sun City Girls are to, say, Derek Bailey. Often the band stay within what we could consider the idiom of Rock (again, instrumental Rock songs like those on Torch and Libyan are what is likely to come to mind when one immediately associates "Sun City Girls" with a sound or style of music), as compared to the non-idiomatic improvisation that Bailey defined as central to what is generally called Free Improvisation or Improvised Music. But at other times Sun City Girls definitely leave behind any expectations regarding how their instruments are to be played. Or, rather, they sometimes do so within a performance, exemplarily so on Dawn of the Devi, their follow-up to Torch. (Though unfortunately reissued on L. P., not C. D., in 2019, Dawn of the Devi has found its way to official streaming channels and so thankfully can be heard by the larger audience it deserves.) As with the work of Bailey or the Spontaneous Music Ensemble or later-day Improvised-Music leading lights like the Evan Parker/ Barry Guy/ Paul Lytton trio, in these moments the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher seem to be a single mind at work on three different instruments. Almost entirely without vocals, Dawn of the Devi provides the best evidence in favor of Masters' claim that the Sun City Girls' improvised Rock is the "molten core of their musical earth." As both Alan and Richard wrote in my Sweet Pea interviews, improvisation has always been fundamental to their art. Other examples of the band jumping from (relatively) standard Rock-instrumental fare into improvised "non-idiomatic" territory are to be heard on the concert recording Carnival Folklore Resurrection 5: Severed Finger with a Wedding Ring
A few other albums that do not make my short list of the band's best, but come awfully close, must include the late-career highlight Djinn Funnel, one of the Girls albums that effectively combines their many streams into an integral whole; it is a raw, live-in-the-room recording but thankfully avoids being an experiment in amplifier-clipping extremes like another fan favorite, Valentines from Matahari. The first entry in the vault-clearing Carnival Folklore Resurrection series, entitled Cameo Demons and Their Manifestations sees the ethnomusicological explorations like those of Flute and Mask creep into relatively-abstract territory. The music on this album seeps into your conscious; initially what sounds brutally minimalist transforms itself in front of your heathen ears into documentation of some sort of imaginary tribal ritual. Another Carnival Folklore entry, the double-disc dual album, High Asia/ Lo-Pacific, is noteworthy. Soundscapes created by field recordings, musique concrète manipulation of such found sounds, and the band's collage-like archival tendencies (as heard on the sprawling three-disc Box of Chameleons) have been at least a minor feature of many Girls releases, going back to their self-titled first L. P. This electroacoustic side of their work became more prominent as their collection of field recordings grew; one hears this on Lo-Asia. Then came the band's "radio" works: the rest of the Carnival Folklore series was devoted to albums actually originally created for radio broadcast, namely Carnival Folklore Resurrection Radio, 98.6 Is Death, and Static from the Outside Set. In these years, Alan and others were releasing similar collage-like works on Sublime Frequencies.
The band's official final studio album, Funeral Mariachi, released posthumously in 2010, received rave reviews from critics and listeners who seemed not to know the band's music well. In fact, much of the album sounds more like an Alvarius B album, especially Baroque Primitiva; and several shorter pieces pass by to little effect. Nonetheless, it does feature a piece of stunning beauty and pathos, ‘Holy Ground’, broaching the elephant in the room, Gocher's death. If you want to win over a Sun City Girls skeptic (an N. P. R.-listening, do-gooder grandma, a grumpy anti-intellect, anti-art American everyman) then play them ‘Holy Ground’ followed by ‘Charles Grocher Sr.’, and shut them up quick.
–Justin J. Kaw, August 2023
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Amid Blue Öyster Cult's Fictions, Forsaken Godless Revolutions
Blue Öyster Cult
Originally released 1972, reissued 2001 (Discogs) with four bonus tracks
Is there another "Classic Rock" band still befuddling listeners as much as Blue Öyster Cult? ("Classic Rock" here fitting a standard definition: the artists who were staples of F. M. radio, filled up arenas, and released album upon album of increasingly-refined music in the years, 1969-1982, trailing off after 1976.) The stories of countless such groups, even those quite obscure, are perennially regurgitated into stereotypical mush in the form of an endless trove of documentary films and glossy special issues of magazines. The Cult, on the other hand, seem like a... cult?—no, a secret society as much as a commercial musical operation. The band has its officiants and gate keepers among a small, aged cohort of devotees: An archivist, Bolle Gregmar, whose collection (a museum?) is largely out of the public eye; a devoted fan, John Schwartz, who wrote a Frequently-Asked Questions ("FAQ") text several years ago—in fact, a fine specimen of that briefly-flourishing, but hardly-missed, literary form—now preserved at the major Cult source of information in the present day, Hot Rails to Hull, a web site mostly serving as a gigography. The author of a book about the group, Martin Popoff, writes in his introduction that he hopes Gregmar will write his own book, deferring to the latter's deeper knowledge.
Let us put this another way—less esoteric? Blue Öyster Cult are not exactly Heavy Metal, Glam, Psychedelia, Punk, Progressive, or the groove-geared Rock of Z. Z. Top, Grand Funk Railroad, et al., but show traits of each. They are frequently placed in the Metal category, but that may be only because they were the first band to use the "Metal umlat" in their name or because they toured with Black Sabbath or because Eric Bloom wore a lot of leather on stage. (And the definition of Heavy Metal was very broad well into the Eighties.) Nonetheless the Cult's biggest hit, ‘(Don't Fear) The Reaper’, bridges the gap between Prog Rock and the A. O. R. mainstream of the late Seventies. Fittingly, in the ensuing years, there were times when they fit in best with the likes of Boston and Styx; not only that, they could beat those bands at their own game, especially on the underrated sixth studio album Mirrors. Or bore the influence of the post-Punk pop-Rock "New Wave", especially on ‘Burnin' for You’, the hit from the best of their later albums, their eighth, Fire of Unknown Origin. For those seeking to satiate any jonesing for vintage Seventies Rock, the Cult seem both to do it too well and to fail to fit the prescription for any defined genre. They are often forgotten, except for ‘Reaper’.
Blue Öyster Cult, Tyranny and Mutation
Originally released 1973, reissued 2001 (Discogs) with four bonus tracks
While Blue Öyster Cult are probably rarely grouped in with Progressive Rock, their Prog-like characteristics are helpful in appreciating their music. Contrary to the post-Bob Dylan Rock standard of a singer-songwriter singing his own songs, all five of Blue Öyster Cult's official members sang and composed; and several confidantes wrote lyrics: Sandy Pearlman, Richard Meltzer, Patti Smith, Helen Wheels. In other words, in the Cult's music, the lyricist is often not a member of the band, let alone the singer; and when a band member did write the lyrics, he did not necessarily take the lead on the finished track. The novice listener is forgiven for not knowing who's singing when. On the first-third albums, guitarist Eric Bloom sings more often than not, the others taking turns. (Bloom is the band's best singer, capable when he is not hewing too closely to Blues stylings of enacting surprisingly poignant moments, as in the song, ‘Veteran of the Psychic Wars’ from Fire of Unknown Origin.) Beginning with the fourth album, Agents of Fortune, there is more variety in the lead vocals; that album includes ‘Reaper’, written and sung by lead guitarist Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser. Granted, there are plenty of examples in Heavy Metal of the singer and lyricist not being one and the same, and the music being composed by varying teams of collaborators. But in Prog Rock this approach seems most prevalent. See, for example, post-Peter Gabriel Genesis. King Crimson, meanwhile, is perhaps the best example of a band having a separate lyricist as a quasi-member.
More generally, Blue Öyster Cult exemplify the Rock band. More precisely, they embody certain tendencies of Rock music that made collectively-named ensembles, as compared to ensembles backing a leader/ solo star, more important than in other genres. A few individuals who would not have made much of a mark on their own fruitfully collaborating as a singular entity; that entity not only sporting a logo, as the Cult did, but also an identity, a purpose. As Rock has declined commercially, crawling away from the mainstream, so too have bands diminished in significance, even within the presumably-welcoming confines of Indie, a change discussed at the Honest Broker ('The Bands Are Never Coming Back') and the Guardian ('Why Bands Are Disappearing'). What has always been rare are bands wherein multiple creative voices become manifest as one, without one of those voices crowding out the others (nevermind the band having been set up in the first place as an outlet for one composer). The band as an art project, instead of a career, is a trait that the Cult share with many Punk/ post-Punk artists, except that Rock bands coming of age in the Punk era were more likely to be led by a singer, or organize themselves around a split in compositional duties between the words and their accompaniment. Though some took on a Prog-collectivist approach: Wire, for example.
Blue Öyster Cult, Secret Treaties
Originally released 1974, reissued 2001 (Discogs) with four bonus tracks
When lyrics do not confirm the listener's arrogant presumption that he knows the person doing the singing—more precisely, that he knows what the singers means and that what the singers means is exactly what the singer thinks—when they are written by committee, so to speak, we can get past such personalized socio-politics and soak in the themes, moods, allusions, references. Blue Öyster Cult certainly offer a heady, rich brew of these. Though the band's direct connection to the budding New York Punk scene came via lyricist partners like Smith and Wheels, the lyrics do not overtly suggest similarities with Punk, but instead point back to the years of the band's long gestation process, 1967-1972, that is: when “turned on” “out front” youthful hippies, especially those who had missed out on the happier pre-1967 times, expected—no, demanded!—a revolution any day now. As the Cult sang in ‘R. U. Ready 2 Rock’: “I only live to be born again.”
Those years encompassed Blue Öyster Cult's beginnings as Soft White Underbelly, development of their Rock-band-as-art-project concept with their manager-mastermind Pearlman, and the recording and release of their self-titled debut album, which in its recording quality is significantly rawer than what was to come. While at times, as on fifth album Spectres' lead-off track and hit single, ‘Godzilla’, the Cult may harken back to the pre-hippie days, other common topics: motorcycle gangs, extraterrestrial life, alienated free-living cast-offs, fetishized sexuality, and conspiracy theories, definitely evoke the paranoia and social upheaval of those years. On top of that, throw in historical oddiments like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Mommie Dearest. Then add a healthy dose of fantastical themes, in some cases in collaboration with another lyricist: the novelist Michael Moorcock, most known in the Rock world for his work with Hawkwind. The end result is music that persistently triggers "heavy" thoughts, and what in the present day, for this listener at least, is the titilating feeling, perhaps only fleeting but strong nonetheless, that secrets are being revealed, forbidden subjects broached. Robertson Davies' novels evoke the same feeling, especially the Deptford Trilogy and What's Bred in the Bone. The cover of Agents of Fortune easily could have served as the cover of a Davies novel.
Blue Öyster Cult, Agents of Fortune
Originally released 1976, reissued 2001 (Discogs) with four bonus tracks
Spectres benefits most from the variation in lead vocals, with bassist Joe Bouchard and his brother, drummer Albert Bouchard, taking two star turns each, sequenced well alongside Bloom's and Roeser's lead vocals. Agents of Fortune, on the other hand, saw Albert sing three songs, two of them on the album's (relatively) lackluster side B; and with keyboardist-guitarist Allen Lanier taking a rare lead on ‘True Confessions’, the album overall does not achieve the balance between Bloom and Roeser that would become crucial to the band's later albums. Either way, a simple history may posit that these two albums witnessed the Cult going pop, a point suggested by the first-third albums comprising the band's "black-and-white" period, their (mostly) monochromatic covers reflecting their relatively-uniform "Rockist" sound. But this take on the band's history leaves out a lot. However more mainstream-oriented the music got, the lyrics in the late Seventies-early Eighties explored more speculative-fiction themes (horror, sci fi, and fantasy) than previously, making the band more “Prog” as well, whereas the criminal/ biker themes prevalent on the earlier albums fit in better with Metal and Punk. At the same time, while Agents of Fortune brought about new levels of commercial success, it also included more collaborations with Patti Smith, and it included what could easily have been a Punk anthem, its rousing opening track ‘This Ain't the Summer of Love’.
Except... Blue Öyster Cult work better as a link between the hippie and punk eras, soundtracking the disillusionment of those who invested too much in "mind-expanding" drugs, post-Psychedelic Rock, and the sexual revolution ("sex, drugs, and Rock-and-Roll," as the common phrase at the time went). Think of ‘This Ain't the Summer of Love’ as a theme song for 1967 and its mythical "summer of love," since any actual such season would have taken place in the winter of 1966, or maybe it was the summer—of 1964, if you were one of the Merry Pranksters. Except again... “love” is not the right word, it never was. Euphoria maybe. Really a drug-induced materialist Millenarianism transformed in the Seventies, in all those arenas and studios where the likes of Blue Öyster Cult played, into excess courting oblivion, justified by vague movements toward dissent and hints at alternate "lifestyles": in short, nonsense, at least compared to the music, which perseveres. So why not connect this turned-inward ("some get strong, some get strange") revolution to stories of schemers, cops and robbers, conspiracists, and otherworldly warriors? On one hand, showmanship and snake oil; on the other, a fun-house version of Roger Waters' Rock-music-as-fascism trope, offered up at the same time. Those cookie-cutter divisions between the hippies and the punks, or Heavy Metal and Punk, and so on, dissolve. "A veteran of a thousand psychic wars"—that sounds right after all. (Way back in 1973, in a Robert Christgau article on the band for Newsday [1, 2 and 3], the emphasis was on the "greasers" who liked heavier music, contrasted with the hippies, with the acknowledgement that the band members themselves were not greasers. Not dissimilar from the supposed divide, not too long ago, between townies and Indie-popster... gownies?)
Blue Öyster Cult, Spectres
Originally released 1977, reissued 2007 (Discogs) with four bonus tracks
There were drawbacks to the band's collectivist and concept-centric approach. Verbosity has never gelled well with song composing, and plenty of awkward stuffing of words into tight musical structures have led to justified critiques of the limitations of Blue Öyster Cult's melodicism (for a contemporaneous example, see the New York Dolls). But I say, keep listening. I find myself, especially on the first-third albums, enjoying the rhythms and textures of the recordings so much that the songs seem to pass without me registering the melody or over-arching structure of the song. That is, they groove on by; they sound too good to pay close attention—like how you don't starting counting measures dancing to Techno music, though you could.
As the original five-piece fell apart; collective decisions perhaps came to reflect social tensions rather than artistic goals. Allen Lanier's main contribution to Fire of Unknown Origin, the closing track ‘Don't Turn Your Back’, has always been a dud to my ears. Indeed, that album's predecessors, Cultösaurus Erectus and Mirrors, both also feature one track too many (‘Hungry Boys’ and ‘Dr. Music’, respectively); the contrast with the picture-perfect sequencings of Tyranny and Mutation and Secret Treaties, nowadays held up as the band's best works, is clear. ‘Hungry Boys’ was drummer Albert Bouchard's lone lead vocal on Erectus, perhaps hinting at Albert's greater interest in crafting what would later become the band's eleventh album, Imaginos, derived from Pearlman's series of poems of the same name. (That album, meant to flesh out Pearlman's elaborate conspiratorial view of modern history, was released in 1988 after years of planning and a belabored production involving an excess of session musicians.) Things got a little worse on Revölution by Night, after which a disenchanted Lanier left, and a lot worse—the worst by far—on Club Ninja. The former at least contains ‘Take Me Away’, one of the greatest songs ever about humans welcoming alien abduction.
Blue Öyster Cult, The Columbia Albums Collection
Released 2012 (Discogs)
The brief essays that Lenny Kaye, compiler of Nuggets and guitarist for Patti Smith among other roles, contributes to these C. D. reissues are fine case studies of how to write reissue liner notes when the reader knows you're a friend of the band. The prose gets a bit purple at times, but we still find revealing historical notes: “The band kept a folder full of Meltzer's and Pearlman's word associations in their rehearsal room, and would leaf through it, setting fragments to music.” Kaye too informs us that, around the time of Agents of Fortune, each member of the group had their own home-recording set-up, allowing them to work on their own songs with greater independence. As we have seen, this change led first to a creative surge then the slow dissolution of the band.
Kaye both describes the music and the lyrics effectively. Regarding the former: "They were was as much Motor City boogie (Amboy Dukes) and Rebel boogie (post-Allman Brothers) as English midland crunch" (referring of course to Black Sabbath). On the latter: “Their cycle gang imagery - enhanced by the biker bar in Hempstead that became their haven, Conry's - had a futuristic feel, a Mad Max sense of mutant apocalypse that fit well with the emergent genre called Heavy Metal, a term bastardized from the writings of William Burroughs.” He adds, “Where some bands attempted to rabble-rouse, BÖC's concerns were more scientific, each song an abstract tale rather than a personal, emotionally wrenching narrative.” A fitting conclusion: “Though scaled to the gargantuan, the Cult never bludgeoned; instead, their music has a filigree delicacy amidst the decibels, the rhythms twisting and shifting, the guitar lines entwining, the lyrics tending toward the mythic and scientifictional.” Kaye more recently wrote the notes for the box set, The Columbia Albums Collection, definitely solidifying his status as one of those aforementioned officiants and gate keepers, welcoming those who embrace the Cult's stories about those seeking newfound freedoms only to lose the freedom they already had.
–Justin J. Kaw, June 2023